A recent Gartner research note highlights the advances in emerging technologies that will have a significant impact in making it easier to build and consume analytical applications. The first key finding highlights an important underlying architecture for enabling self-service analytics:

In-memory analytics will make it easier to build high-performance analytical applications against large data sets. Coupling in-memory analytics with interactive visualization will enable a broader class of users to explore data sets and discover insights.

We believe this research note reinforce the the reality that some long held business assumptions are rapidly falling by the wayside. Chief among them is the belief that only the largest enterprises can have access to leading eedge analytical capabilities.